Steam Adds a Brand-New Point Shop for the Summer Sale and Beyond

Steam’s Summer Sale has just kicked off, and as always, there are wallet-breaking deals on hundreds of your favorite and soon-to-be-favorite games. As with every summer sale, there’s a unique gimmick this time around – a 5 dollar discount for purchases over 30 dollars is one, and another is a special point system that won’t be unfamiliar to anyone who’s engaged with these special seasonal Steam sales before. But there’s something special about this system that warrants a particular highlight.

But before we get ahead of ourselves: this new point system is shockingly straightforward. For every 1 dollar you spend on games and stuff, you get 100 points. As those points add up, you can spend them on Avatars, Avatar frames, and even certain in-game items, like stickers for Doom or backgrounds for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Their range is between 100 and 5,000 a pop, so you can afford just about whatever your heart fancies with even a single purchase.

You can also use points in the community section of Steam, giving extra kudos to a post or a review you find helpful, funny, etc., which will deck out that post with some swag and get the person who posted it some extra points too.

That said, if you check it out yourself you’re likely to notice you have a LOT of points already. That’s because this point shop isn’t just a Summer Sale thing: apparently, it’s going to be sticking around for the long haul.

Points don’t expire over time, but if you refund a game you also lose points. Points also can’t be traded directly with other people, nor can the things you buy with them, and they have no impact on the trading card system

So… that’s pretty cool, I guess. Maybe not what Steam needs to go back to being well-loved, but some of the stickers are pretty cute.